Metadata | Libraries | Archives

This week, we had a case at my library where we wanted to extract the full-text field for a few of our digital collections and save it as a separate text file for each image. Normally, we create text files for images by running OCR on them outside of CONTENTdm. But for a few collections,…

Earlier this summer, I had an experience where a collection that I was creating metadata for had a really strong emotional impact on me. It felt really significant, and made me think about the ways that I relate to collections that I work with. I tweeted about the experience at the time, and I’ve collected…

I’m working on a handful of projects about the history of MARC, and one of the things that would be really useful to me is a good, concise history of the family of MARC formats. I haven’t been able to find quite what I’m looking for, so I decided to make it! The timeline below…

I’m trying to get better at writing out the process for things that I do in my day-to-day metadata work. Mostly, I want to do this for my own personal use – to help me think through my processes more clearly, and to have something to refer back to the next time I want to…

After reading about the Jane-athon that is happening at ALA Midwinter in a few months, I decided that I’d like to play around with RDA cataloging outside of the strictures of MARC. I had a quiet afternoon at my library a few weeks ago, so I figured it was a good time to download the…

I tweeted about this a little earlier, but it stayed in my mind for a while today, so I thought it deserved a fuller exploration. This is all very sketchy and not fully thought-out, but it’s something I’ve thought about before and don’t have any easy answers for. I spent this morning curled with a…

Over the past few months, I have been reclassifying the “Popular Movie Collection” at the small academic library where I work. This is the second of two blog posts about the project. In the first entry, I wrote about finding a way to fit movies into the Library of Congress classification system. In this post,…

Over the last few months, I have been working on reclassifying the “Popular Movie Collection” at the small academic library where I work. This is the first of two blog posts I am planning about the project, describing the process of deciding how to classify the movies. [Update: Part 2 can be found here.] The…

I just got home from a great talk at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives. The talk was about the queer geography of South Florida from the 1970s to today, using census data and advertisements in archived gay magazines to track movements of lesbian and gay households and businesses through different communities in the area….

I recently read this article about the Allen Ginsberg collection at Stanford, which I saw on Twitter, and was really struck by several things about it. The first was the description of how thinking about his personal collection inspired Ginsberg himself to become more interested in photography: Morgan, [Ginsberg’s personal archivist] who spent 20 years cataloging…